A naturological approach to marketing exchanges: Implications for the bottom of the pyramid

Marketing as exchange has been the sine qua non of the field for over thirty years. While buyer-seller dyads dominate traditional conversations, other forms of transactions are included as long as value transfer occurs. The most logical extension is Stakeholder Theory, an approach with the same basic structure for understanding, maintaining, and advancing important relationships among firms and their constituencies. Together, they posit that self-contained individuals or units have a marked impact on one another, which passes across defined boundaries at discrete periods of time. Yet the failure to capture organic and dynamic ways in which such entities interact necessities a new approach, such as the naturological perspective that recognizes porous boundaries and reverberating consequences of marketing exchanges, especially among consumers and other impacted parties who survive at or near the proverbial bottom of the economic pyramid.